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Home , Bob Woodward, Pat Nixon, Richard Nixon, Theodore Roosevelt, Watergate scandal

Richard Looking inward

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This transcript was run through an automated transcription service and then lightly edited for clarity. There may be typos or small discrepancies from the podcast audio.

BOB WOODWARD: The day he resigned, he called all of his aides and friends and family to the of the just before he left on the helicopter – a couple of hours before he actually left office through .

And he had his wife and daughters and son-in-laws there, and it was a rambling talk about the grievances he felt. His mother wasn't treated right. His father was poor. And then at one point, he raised and kind of with his hand indicated, 'This is why I called you all here.'

And then he said, 'Always remember: Others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.'

It was the hate that was the poison that destroyed him in his presidency. And at that moment, to his credit, he understood it.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: That's , one of the Post reporters who uncovered the that brought down Nixon's presidency. I'm Lillian Cunningham also with , and this is the 36th episode of “Presidential.”

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LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: This episode is going to focus on Watergate and Nixon's resignation -- looking at what it was about Nixon's personality and his view of power that ultimately led to, as he said, a sort of self-destruction.

I do think some early biography is always important, though. So, before I turn back to Bob Woodward, I'm going to tell just the short version of Nixon's pre-presidency story.

So, was born in Yorba Linda, in 1913, and his family lived on a lemon ranch. But the ranch failed while he was still a child, and it left his family in financial distress. So, they moved to a nearby town when he was about nine-years old, and his family ran a gas station that was part grocery store. His father was supposedly a pretty aggressive, angry guy. And his

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 1 mother was the gentler one. She was a devout Quaker. They had five sons. And Richard was the second. But two of Richard's died from illnesses while they were boys.

Now, Nixon was a great student all through high school. He actually won an award and a scholarship to attend Harvard. But because his family didn't have enough money for the additional expenses of sending him there, he instead went to the local college, .

And while he was there, he was president of the student body. He won that election mostly because he supported having dances on campus. Very cute. But he actually always had something of an affinity for the arts. In addition to debate and student politics, he played several instruments throughout his life, and he was also always interested in theater. In fact, he later met his wife Pat because they were both cast in a production of 'The Dark Tower,' a sort of mystery drama put on by a small theater company.

Anyway, he went to law school at on a scholarship and then he joined a law firm back in his hometown after he didn't get some of the more high-profile jobs he applied for, including a job at the FBI.

Then in World War II, he joined the Navy. And once the war was over, he returned to California, and that's when he really started to get into politics. And he ran for a seat in Congress in 1946. Now, he won that seat as a Republican in a big upset against a five-term Democratic congressman. And from that point on, he has a very fast political rise. He serves that first term in Congress, and then he runs for a Senate seat in 1950, and he wins that as well.

Then, only two years after that, Dwight Eisenhower picks Nixon as his vice presidential in the 1952 election. Of course, they go on to win the election. And this makes Nixon vice president at only 40-years old. It's worth pointing out, though, that along the way, he starts to gain a reputation for -- he seems to be winning a lot of these races mostly by attacking his opponents and finding their weaknesses, rather than focusing on his merits as a candidate.

Alright, so he's vice president for two terms, and then once Eisenhower is ready to leave office, Nixon tries to move from the vice presidency to being president himself. So, he runs in the 1960 election against John F. , but he ends up losing. Kennedy beats him by the smallest popular vote margin in U.S. history. And that loss deeply stung and shaped Nixon.

He wrote later in his memoirs that: 'From this point on, I had the wisdom and wariness of someone who had been burned by the power of the Kennedys and their money and by the license they were given by the media. I vowed that I would never again enter an election at a disadvantage by being vulnerable to them or anyone on the level of political tactics.'

That loss was followed two years later by another loss, when he ran for in 1962. After that defeat, Nixon gave a famous press conference, where he said to the media, 'You don't have Nixon to kick around anymore.'

But after several years of licking his wounds, he was back. In 1968, he ran for president again, and this time against Lyndon Johnson's vice president, . And Nixon wins.

OK, so there are, of course, many things other than Watergate that we could discuss about Nixon's

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 2 presidency, which started in 1969 and ended with his resignation in 1974. Most notably, Nixon tends to get a lot of credit for his foreign policy achievements. He made a historic trip to that set the U.S. and China on a course to more peaceful relations. He also struck an agreement with the to limit the number of nuclear missiles that they had. And he signed the , which ended 's military involvement in the .

But he is also the only president in American history to resign the office of the presidency. So, we're going to talk about that. And the person we're going to talk about that with is, as I said, Bob Woodward. He was one of the most influential reporters in uncovering the scandals of the Nixon White House that led to the resignation. And I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to use this episode to ask his reflections on Nixon's downfall.

Now, if we flash back to 1972, Bob Woodward and were two junior reporters at The Post. They're now often described as having broken the biggest story in American politics.

What happened was that they started looking into a at the Democratic National Committee headquarters that were at the Watergate building complex here in D.C., and their effort to find out who was responsible for the burglary ultimately led them to the presidency itself.

In the four decades since then, Woodward has continued to unearth even more on Nixon. Just last year, he published a book called 'The Last of the President's Men,' which revealed a trove of new documents and previously untold stories from . Butterfield was the aide to Nixon who originally disclosed that the president had a secret audio taping system, and this is what provided the main evidence for Nixon's involvement in the Watergate scandal.

So, without further ado, with me here in The Washington Post studio is Bob Woodward. Bob, thank you so much for doing this.

BOB WOODWARD: Thank you.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: To start, could you paint sort of a psychological portrait of Nixon, the man? If you were to distill him down to a few traits that you think really shaped and defined him, what would some of those be?

BOB WOODWARD: Well, of course, we have these thousands of hours of secret tape recordings that have become public as a result of the Watergate investigation, and there's much more about him, not just on Watergate, but on Vietnam, on domestic policies, his relationship.

So, there is a psychiatric portrait of him that emerges. And what you see is a great deal of paranoia -- that he converted the office of the presidency almost to an instrument of personal revenge; that he would use the IRS, the FBI, the CIA, even the Secret Service, any instrument of government to get back at the people who were real enemies or perceived enemies. And so, he strayed off the of what the presidency is about.

A presidency has to not look inward, but outward. A president must define what the next stage of good is for a majority of people out there. Not for him, not for her. He was so obsessed with himself that he didn't figure out what the job was, and he thought it somehow was central that he retain power.

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LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Do you have a sense of where that came from -- the paranoia and that sort of sense of vengeance?

BOB WOODWARD: He was a street fighter in politics -- when he ran for Congress the first time in the ‘40s, when he ran for the Senate, when he ran for vice president. And it was a sense of: 'The establishment is after me.The establishment doesn't understand me.’ and I tried to think, and have for many years thought, about, ‘What was Watergate? What was this thing that did him in?’

It was that hate.

He went after anyone that was an opponent and wound up really attacking the electoral system we have in this country. He spied on opponents; tried to their campaigns in a way unheard of -- hiring people to go out and spread false rumors, write out false press releases.

The manifestation was Watergate and a Watergate mentality: 'I'm going to do anything to retain power.'

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: You hear some of their descriptions of the paranoia and the willingness to lie -- the feeling that everyone's out to get him. And to me, it starts to sound really similar actually to some of the descriptions of his predecessor, President Johnson.

BOB WOODWARD: The most important part that is similar is that both Johnson and Nixon wanted to overpower people and everything -- control everything.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, what's an example of that for Nixon -- like, an example even early in his presidency of that paranoia and his desire for control?

BOB WOODWARD: One was Christmas 1969. Nixon had been president almost a year, and he's going over to the staff offices in the Executive Office Building next to the White House. And he sees that lots of people have pictures of John F. Kennedy on their desk or on the wall.

And he goes berserk and orders Butterfield to get rid of these pictures and replace them with Nixon. And I kind of thought maybe this was a bit of an exaggeration. And then one of the things that happened was Butterfield wrote a memo to Nixon about how he got Nixon's pictures to replace the 22 Kennedy pictures that he found -- in some cases where the president had personally signed it to them. And in the memo, the heading is 'Sanitization of the Staff Offices.’

Sanitization – as if, somehow, getting rid of Kennedy pictures was a cleansing operation. It’s incredibly bizarre. And Butterfield had to work on this, and investigate people. They were worried about whether these people were loyal to Nixon and so forth. And if he could've relaxed and realized there was just a lot of goodwill even Democrats felt for him. He couldn't find a way to leverage that goodwill to his advantage. It was, 'We're going to get him.'

And then when he was reelected in '72, he said, 'Now, we're really going to get people. It's going to be payback time.' And this is what's a sad component of all of this. There was very little joy in being president.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Joy was actually kind of the heart of our episode --

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 4 someone who seemed to take a lot of joy in being president.

BOB WOODWARD : Yes, and Theodore Roosevelt took a lot of joy in living.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Right.

BOB WOODWARD: Nixon did not. As Butterfield told me -- we went through dozens of hours of interviews about his experience, and he'd never really told it before -- there are scenes, one comes to mind, where Butterfield is riding in the presidential helicopter with Nixon and the First Lady. And says, 'Oh, Dick. Let's go up to . Christmas is coming. We'll take the girls. It'd be a good time. We'll go to a show.'

And Nixon is there, writing something out on his yellow legal pad. Just totally ignores her, and she keeps going,you know, 'Dick?' Nothing. And Butterfield was just astounded and horrified that there wouldn't be the kind of, 'Yes, dear. Let's talk about it, or we'll consider it.' He just closed off his own wife.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Wow.

BOB WOODWARD: At the same time, there were documents in the Butterfield archive that show Nixon knew how to play to people's egos. And there's a dinner at that was recorded. You find Nixon's able to talk to his cabinet in a very human, almost humorous way and play on their ego. But he would then drift back into the automatic pilot of anger mode. It was that sense of isolation, that sense of a personal crusade to do things, to accomplish things.

At the end of the day, 6:30 at night, Nixon would leave the and walk over to his private office in the executive office building that was more casual -- and he'd be there and he would have dinner alone, writing things out on that yellow legal pad. Now, you're president of the . You'd think he'd want to go be with his family, which he didn't want to do too often. He can talk to anyone in the world, right? And you would think he would have some more curiosity about that. But he wanted to be alone.

And Butterfield described -- and other people who worked for Nixon -- going into that private office he had, and he'd have his feet up and have his jacket on. There was just this sense of, 'Chill out. Enjoy it, and look for what good you can do for people.'

Now, to his credit, sometimes he did on some things. But again, it was this drive and this paranoia and this score-settling attitude.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: What are the couple of redeeming qualities?

BOB WOODWARD: He did some things in foreign policy. His [work with] China was significant, and he leveraged it, I would even say, brilliantly -- the same with relations with the Soviet Union.

He had some domestic pluses -- creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and so forth. So, there were things in all of this illegal and corruption and ugly debris that are quite positive and quite strong and quite human. But that pales.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, do you feel like you have a sense of why he wanted to be president --

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 5 why he wanted power in the first place?

BOB WOODWARD : He wanted to be president, in part, to show people. He resented deeply the eastern establishment, the people -- and he talks about this on the tapes -- the people who had it all, the people who had it handed to them.

He wanted to be a renowned leader, also. And he did not perceive or have a system or relationships with anyone who could kind of tell him, 'Hey, what's going on in this presidency? It's running off the rails and finally off the cliff.'

His national security adviser, -- you see time and time again, Kissinger as a kind of fawning synchophant to Nixon. And Kissinger was smarter than that and would try to steer things his way. But he would never overtly, to my knowledge, challenge Nixon and say, 'No, no. Wait. What are we trying to do here?'

There is a memo that Butterfield gave me -- what I call the 'Zilch Memo.' On a top secret document, Nixon wrote a handwritten note to Kissinger about the bombing in Vietnam and said, 'We've done it for three years, and it's achieved zilch. It's been a failure. Doesn't make sense.'

And then you look at the record and, at that point, this is January of 1972, just as Nixon is beginning to run for re-election. He's dropped 3 million tons of bombs in Southeast Asia. And he says it's accomplished nothing. It's been a failure. Doesn't make sense. Accomplished zilch.

I was stunned when I read this. And then you look, and you see that in '72, he intensified the bombing, and the tapes show that it was, in large part, done because it showed how tough he was, and the polling showed the public wanted more bombing and toughness.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, even though he knew it was not effective, he still did it just for the look of it?

BOB WOODWARD: Yeah, and I mean that's an equivalent corruption to Watergate and that, to me, when I saw it last year, was a stunner. I thought: 'How could you have lost your way that you would do that -- essentially killing thousands of people in , , Laos to put down a political marker?’

Now, presidents don't like to lose wars. But realism needs to overtake that at some point, and you need to say, if you're a commander-in-chief, ‘What are we accomplishing and are we killing people with a purpose?’

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: What do you feel like has changed the most about your understanding of Nixon?

BOB WOODWARD: The more the record comes out -- these Butterfield documents and his stories and more tapes (they still haven't released all of the tapes, believe it or not) -- the story gets worse rather than better.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, maybe before we even get to Watergate -- 1971 is the publication of Papers. That's also the year you started at The Washington Post, right?

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 6 BOB WOODWARD: Yes.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Could you describe what the climate was like to be in at that time and already what friction there was between the Nixon administration and the press?

BOB WOODWARD: It was substantial, and you could feel it in the air. He had contempt for the press because they seemed to be after him. He also worried that people could find out who he really was. He was a concealed person.

You know, at one point he says in one of these tapes, 'The problem is we've been too open with the press.’ And, of course, it's the opposite. And time and time again, you see he just doesn't tell . He doesn't level. And, of course, then when people would challenge him and say ‘there's information that contradicts what you said’ -- and that was the Watergate story -- in many ways, he would just become more and more infuriated.

When I came here in September of 1971, it was three months after the battle which, of course, the press had won in the Supreme Court. And, of course, that angered Nixon. And part of the secret operations were going after , who had leaked the Pentagon Papers first to and then here to The Washington Post. And the editor was , and he wasn't . People have said he was -- he wasn't partisan. He was looking for a good story. He was interested in getting to what was hidden. And, of course, I think his instincts told him there was much hidden about Nixon.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, obviously the Pentagon Papers, in part, reveal the extent to which Johnson and his administration had lied to the public about parts of Vietnam. And so, there's already, it seems, this breach of trust that people are feeling with the presidency.

And then along comes Watergate. And I think there are probably a number of listeners who have a vague understanding of Watergate but might benefit from having you just sort of lay out: What did Nixon do? And what really did Watergate encompass?

BOB WOODWARD: You're right to pinpoint the Pentagon Papers in 1971, but we now know from the tapes and documents and testimony and the memoirs of people who worked for Nixon that Watergate really was five wars. And the first war began in 1970 before the Pentagon Papers, and it was directed at the anti-war movement.

Nixon believed in carrying out the Vietnam War, and there was this vast anti-war movement, which was having an impact. So, they developed what's called the ' Plan,' a top secret plan in 1970 to break into homes and offices of people who were connected with the anti-war movement. It was later rescinded when the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover objected -- not because of the legality or the morality, but Hoover thought breaking into people's homes and apartments and wiretapping was the bailiwic of the FBI exclusively. He didn't want other people involved.

There are tapes in which Nixon refers to the Houston Plan, even though it's rescinded, and says, 'Let's implement it' -- and proposed at one point in June of '71 getting people to break into the The Brookings Institute. It's an extraordinary tape, and if you listen to it, Nixon is just furious. He says, 'I want us to go in and get those papers. Do it on a thievery basis. Blow the safe,' and he just couldn't get off it.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 7 So, that's the first phase of Watergate, I think. The second phase is really a war against the news media, which was reporting on Vietnam. That's when they hired Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt to try to ascertain where news leaks were coming from.

And there was a war on Daniel Ellsberg who leaked the Pentagon Papers, and then there were 17 wiretaps on reporters and people in the Nixon White House thought to be leaking. The third phase of Watergate is to take that Howard Hunt/Gordon Liddy team, and send it over to the campaign. And the war was against the Democrats -- break into their headquarters, spy on and sabotage the Democratic candidates.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And this is the phase where you enter, since your reporting starts with that break-in at the DNC headquarters in the .

BOB WOODWARD: And the fourth phase, when Nixon got caught, was a war on justice. It was the cover-up: 'Let's keep the system from finding out what really happened.' And then, when the tapes were disclosed and everything came out, and he resigned in 1974, he spent much of the next 20 years declaring -- and this was the fifth war, the war on history -- to try to say, 'Oh Watergate wasn't much.'

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, you see those as the five pillars.

BOB WOODWARD: Anyone who is going to oppose and challenge him -- first, it's the anti-war movement; then, it's the news media; then, the Democrats, the political opposition; then, the investigators who were looking into this, the Senate Watergate Committee, the impeachment inquiry and so forth; and then, when he loses and resigns, it's a rear-guard action against history.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: What do you think has changed most about the nature of the relationship between the press and the presidency since Nixon?

BOB WOODWARD: It's not a healthy relationship. Remember, a number of years ago, , after he'd left the vice presidency, I asked him, 'How much do we know about what really goes on? What percentage of what occurred in the Clinton White House when you were vice president, that is of consequence, do we now know?’

And Al Gore said, 'We only know 1 percent.' Now, he was joking, and that's extreme. I think we know 50, 60, 70 percent. But often, the most significant things we don't know -- they're hidden.

And the relations with the press …The message managers have so much more control on the White House and the various departments. And they want to have it on their terms. And there is not that level of candor and straight talk that actually serves people who are presidents quite well. It certainly was awful in the Nixon White House -- the relationship between the media and the White House. Now, it has its ups and downs, but it's not good. And I can understand that on the part of presidents, because anytime there's something negative, press is going to jump on it.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: I mean, Watergate signaled, really, the lowest point in trust for the presidency, but a very high point for trust in journalism. Certainly the investigations, I think, inspired a lot of people to even want to be journalists -- to consider journalism public service. But if you look around today, trust in our elected leaders is very low. Trust in the press is very low.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 8 BOB WOODWARD: I think it's easy to overstate what happened back in the '70s. We and others did some stories, but it was really the Senate, the House of Representatives, the special prosecutor who dug into this. One of the little snapshots, which is quite surprising -- when they, the Senate, set up the Watergate committee and Democrats were in control, the resolution went to the Senate floor and it passed 77-0. Dozens of Republicans voting to investigate their president, because there was a feeling we need to know.

There's a lot of smoke out there now. You would never get the Senate to agree to anything, let alone an investigation unanimously. So, it was a particular moment in time here. There was so much Nixon had been up to. So much was concealed. And it's my view if the tapes didn't come out, he would not have resigned.

The tapes really showed the Republicans, exemplified by who turned against him. I remember Goldwater telling Carl Bernstein and myself about Nixon. He said, 'Too many lies. Too many crimes.'

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Do you think that Nixon's resignation, in some ways, helped restore some faith in the presidency and the idea that, at least if we have people unsuited for office, they leave office? Or do you think his resignation just furthered the American public's sense that they shouldn't have any faith in their leaders?

BOB WOODWARD : Well, they're two different things. I mean, what I think you can argue is that the system, the constitutional system, worked. Nixon resigned because he'd lost the support of the Republicans -- knew he was going to be impeached in the House -- and Goldwater told him there were only four votes for him in the Senate. And the next day, Nixon announced his resignation. So, the system worked, but it's like a billiard ball going around the table.

It had a big impact on where we are now, I think. If you didn't have Nixon's resignation, you never would have had a presidency. If you didn't have a Ford presidency and the distrust about the , you probably wouldn't have had Carter in '76 with his purity outsider 'I'll never lie to you.' If you didn't have Carter, you likely might not have had Reagan. And with no Reagan picking George Herbert Walker Bush as his vice president, you wouldn't have had the first Bush presidency. And without the first Bush presidency, I don't think he would have had Clinton, where an outsider could come in again. And if you didn't have the [next] Bush presidency, I'm not sure you would have had the Obama presidency. So, the impact each of those presidents had on the next election is immense.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Following his resignation, there was a slew of legislative reforms that came out, in a way, to try to restore the public's confidence in their elected officials and to rebalance the power of the executive office. Do you think that the reforms put in place were the ones that we needed?

BOB WOODWARD: Well, you know, some of it worked. Some of it didn't. Obviously, restricting campaign contributions worked for a while, and now that's gone with the Supreme Court decision. People and groups and corporations can donate endless amounts of money and put more money into politics. So, in that sense, there's a failure. It's not something you can correct with laws. I think it's something you can correct with who was the person who's president.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, what's the biggest leadership lesson that you take from Nixon's

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 9 presidency?

BOB WOODWARD: That the presidency is a sacred trust; that it's not something the person who is president owns or is entitled to; that what needs to accompany that office is a great deal of humility.

You listen to enough of those tapes, and what is important is the dog that doesn't bark. To my knowledge, no one ever says, 'What does the country need? What would be good?' It was always about Nixon settling scores, his political standing and future -- how it could be leveraged.

I think we need to learn the presidency is not about the president. The presidency is about the execution of the Constitution and laws within the defined framework in the interest of the people in the country.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: You never met Nixon, right?

BOB WOODWARD : No. No.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Do you wish that you had?

BOB WOODWARD : We tried. Carl Bernstein and I tried, but we never got close. And he was quite angry at our stories. And that's understandable.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Do you ever get tired of him? Of studying him? Of thinking about him? Of having your own life story so intertwined with his?

BOB WOODWARD : Tired? I don't know. Because there's always new material and tapes and new dimension to Nixon. So, the ultimate lesson is: History is never over.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: In the spirit of history never being over, I thought I'd end this episode by asking current Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron for his reflections on how the legacy of the Nixon era still reverberates in newsrooms today.

MARTY BARON: I hear all the time from people in the public who refer back to what the Washington Post did in the era of Watergate and are calling upon us, demanding that we do the same kind of work -- that we hold our politicians accountable and that we dig beneath the surface, and that we keep digging and that we be persistent.

Those events actually inspired a whole new generation of journalists, people of my age group, to get into the field in the first place. I think it also sharpened the definition of what our core mission is -- it's certainly one of our most important core missions -- and that is that we are supposed to hold powerful individuals and powerful institutions accountable.

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